Lifesavers for the unemployed expat. . .

or another thing that gets me through the week.

I discovered this Fall that a number of US universities have lectures available as podcasts or streaming files. I can't tell you how many days this has helped me pass at home. It's worlds away from Arbeitslosenfernsehen. There aren't nearly enough for the non-computer gal, but let me at least point out the one's I've been listening to.

ANTH379 (Indians of North America)
This lecture gets off to an extremely slow start. Lots of talk of diet, etc. and I think Dr. Watson is a lecturer whose style you either love or hate. He strikes me as quite avuncular, and I find the subject material interesting.

Somewhere online there is a list that has all the Purdue Boilercast course numbers translated into real-people-speak, but I have lost the link to the page and have not been able to find it again. I'd be grateful to have it if anyone else stumbles onto it. Otherwise, one must listen to the first few minutes of the first lecture of each class or hunt for the university catalog online. Of course, the department name should be more or less clear from the course name.

There are also quit a few polysci letctures and sociology - I just never got that far. Maybe next semester.

And leading me to wish that I had wanted to go to college in CA like most of the other people in my class are the Berkeley course offerings.

I am a particular fan of European History from the Rennaissance to the Present. There's a video feed for this course, too. The professor uhh's way to much, but if you can get past that, the course is entertaining and I love his references to period art and music to illustrate his theses about historical trends. One gets the feeling that the lecturer has a profound sympathy with the people about whose times he is speaking - quite bluntly, he doesn't speak condescendingly about them, he seeks to explain their world view to the extent that you or I could set ourselves in their places rather than pitying them in their ignorance. And he speaks very knowlegably about Catholicism. There are a couple of points where I would have worded something differently, but generally he is really good. He's plenty critical of the Church in later lectures, but that is his "gutes Recht", and it definitely comes through that he has had more than a little bit of German. If I had moose hooves to award, this lecture gets all 4.

Also worth a listen, although I don't think I progressed much beyond the first few lectures was Geo 10 World Regions, Peoples, and States Even if you don't want to listen to the whole series, the second lecture in which he discusses an in class assignment in which students were to devise a plan for regionalizing the US for representation on a map was pretty amusing.

We've also been listening to Earthquakes in Your Backyard. I liked the Hurricane Katrina wrap up, although I thought it wasn't nearly detailed enough. Physics for future presidents also had a nice 9/11 recap lecture. The lecturer is a bit too self-congratulatory, but a lot of folks do that when retelling historic events. His retelling brought me crashing back to 9/11 because I spent the day with my ex-boyfriend who was visiting from Europe. He is an academic in the materials science field, so there was someone to fill in the missing pieces for me (temperatures at which steel begins to deform) very early on. We'll save all that for 9/11 next year and hope that by then, I won't have half so much time to blog!